Our society is one where we and many objects that we value are very mobile. Of particular present interest, at one time or another a large proportion of such objects will be picked up, shipped, and delivered from one location to another. The ubiquitous example of a system for this in the United States is the postal mail and parcel post system provided by the U.S. Postal Service, wherein objects are delivered to us at a mailbox or postbox and in many places we can also leave objects at our personal mailboxes for pickup to be sent to others.
Almost as common today are private parcel delivery services, which operate similarly in many respects. Most of these started out delivering and picking up objects at our homes and workplaces, and today many have grown into operations that resemble a full postal system in end result. Notably, many of these services today provide tens, hundreds, or even thousands of postboxes to their clients. There are various reasons these have appeal, including efficiency, cost, privacy, and reliability, to state only a few. Some current examples of such services are United Parcel Service, with its UPS STORES, and Federal Express, with its FedEx DEPOTS.
In our workplaces we see all of these systems used, and often one or more organizational delivery and pickup systems as well. Many of us use these regularly and rely upon them for our own and our organization's economic well being.
The nature of the objects delivered and picked up in all of these systems can vary considerably. For example, an object can be as small as a business card, as common as a letter, as fragile and perishable as a bouquet of flowers, or as large and as expensive as a 60 inch (1.5 meter) plasma-screen television.
The nature of the places where these objects are delivered and picked up can also vary considerably. The place may be open, enclosed on most sides, or completely enclosable. On a company loading dock or in its shipping room as little as a sign reading “Deliveries” may demarcate a space on the floor or an open desktop where deliveries are to be left and pickups to be taken from. In contrast, the common hotel lobby drop box and office “mailbox” are usually open on one or two sides. Alternately, typical postal mailboxes today are completely enclosable, having a door that must be opened to put an object inside and the same or another door then opened to remove the object.
Another aspect of the places where objects are delivered and picked up is their remoteness from us when delivery or pickup actually occurs. For instance, for most of us that work outside the home, objects delivered to our homes arrive while we are away. In many rural areas and in most urban apartment or condo complexes today, the places where objects are delivered often is some distance away from our personal living space, say, on the first floor, at the end of the lane, or even away in the nearest town. In our work places, we rarely are in the mailroom when objects arrive for us, and in our mobile world we may already be half way around the world by the time an object that we left in the mailroom is picked up.
The natures of the parties involved in all of this are somewhat easier to characterize. A delivery person or clerk deliverers an object to a previously designated place for us to retrieve, and we can often leave an object in such a place for such a clerk or delivery person to pickup.
Unfortunately, these delivery and pickup systems often have a common limitation—they generally include no way to advise us that a delivery or pickup has occurred. Sometimes this is not important, but other times it can be critically important to us to know this and details about it. For example, if we are waiting for important documents that require our signature and prompt return, we do not want to have to wait in or repeatedly visit our company mailroom, hotel lobby, or apartment building foyer until the documents arrive. Keeping even the fact of the delivery or pickup private or secure can also be an important concern. After all, we may not want flowers delivered to us setting out for hours where our neighbors or coworkers can see then and start idle speculation or even walk over and read a return address. And we probably do not want our newly delivered 60 inch television to sit out in the rain until we come home, or to sit unattended long enough that it might be stolen.
Of course, various solutions to this delivery and pickup status problem exist. If we live in an apartment building our mail-person may customarily press the entryway door-buzzer for each tenant who's mailbox they deliver mail to. Or we can inform a mailroom clerk in our company that we are expecting important documents and ask them to call us when those arrive. But such ad-hoc human solutions tend to have their own set of problems. Few mail-people today buzz tenants about mail deliveries, because they know that people often are not home to hear the buzzer or that those who are may work nights and resent such. Or our company's mailroom clerk may not tell their lunch time substitute how to deal with our important documents.
In response to the failings of such systems, more formal and sophisticated ones have been developed. For example, Mail Boxes Etc. now offers a service with the self-descriptive name “CALL-IN MAILCHECK™ SERVICE.” Some organizations have even tried having their object delivery and pickup places individually “hard wired” with buttons to push to activate an alarm in the event of a delivery or pickup. Alternately, a company can institute a policy that its mailroom clerks should always send an e-mail notification to an employee when a delivery is received. However, these approaches still have limitations and disadvantages. For instance, they are unduly susceptible to human failure and their reliance on additional human activity often makes them too expensive.
Considerations like this have resulted in still more sophisticated solutions being devised that attempt to entirely remove any “human factor.” One such solution that has been proposed, albeit one that we do not know to have actually been put into practical use, is to mount video-surveillance cameras where they can view mailboxes and to then use computerized image processing and pre-stored repository position information to determine which mailboxes are being or have been accessed. Variations on this even encompasses having the holder of a mailbox be notified by an automated e-mail or v-mail.
Unfortunately, while such an approach is highly laudable for creativity and providing an excellent set of user-notification features, it still lacks in practicality by being expensive and error prone. For example, if the act of a clerk accessing a mailbox is that used as determinative, multiple cameras may need to be used or the clerk may have to adopt consistent movement patterns. Alternately, if the presence of an object in a mailbox is what is used as determinative, multiple cameras may still be needed, to catch smaller or flat objects, and the color, texture, etc. of the objects may still cause them to be overlooked.
Accordingly, what is needed is an improved delivery and pickup determination system. Such a system should preferably be both highly automated and economical; should preferably require minimal, if any, interaction with or changes from conventional practice by the clerks engaged in handling deliveries and pickups; and should preferably work with the same wide variety of types of objects that existing systems customarily handle.